Luke Fowler Index Cards and Letters

Mum's Cards, 2018, 16mm film with mono optical sound, Duration 9 minutes 3 seconds, Installation view, Luke Fowler 'Index Cards and Letters', The Modern Institute, Osborne Street, 2021

We speak of families as though we all knew what families are.
- R.D. Laing, Politics of the Family (1971)

The Modern Institute presents Luke Fowler for Glasgow International 2021. Having built a filmography that is largely focussed on marginalised or forgotten public figures, Index Cards and Letters marks a turning point in the artist’s body of work toward the personal and the interpersonal. The show comprises two recent 16mm films: Mum’s Cards (2018) and For Dan (2021). Mum’s Cards reflects on the tools of his mother’s trade, an archive of index cards which embody a lifetime’s intellectual labour as a social scientist; whilst For Dan, filmed in an eco-community in Queensland, Australia, explores an intense period of correspondence between his late father and his best friend, the radical university lecturer Dan O’Neill. The film documents impressionistically both the friendship between these two young men and a political history of Australia in the early 1960s.

Installation view, Luke Fowler 'Index Cards and Letters', The Modern Institute, Osborne Street, 2021

Installed between the twin poles of his mother’s cards and father’s letters, are a constellation of framed photographs. Mapping The Family (2021) is a new series which pairs negatives found in his parents’ archive with the artist’s own. The photographs raise the idea of a familial gaze, entwining the amateur and the professional, the public and private; thus imprinting a “structure of feeling” whilst underscoring how time becomes an intrinsic essence, and later becomes a “shared hallucination” within the frame. Presented alongside the photographs are objects taken from the Fowlers’ family home: rocks, fossils, a batik print by Norma Starszakowna, and pottery all establish a context and atmosphere for the works to be experienced as a whole.

Immersed in the material limits of his subjects as well as the tools he uses to make them, Fowler’s long-standing use of a 16mm wind-up Bolex camera and dis-synchronous sound is imprinted within the narratives of his films - form and content becoming intrinsically linked. His previous films have been described as ‘para-documentary’, interweaving archival footage with his own camerawork and sounds. However, in these more personal films, the striking quality of sensitivity and openness which refuses to shy away from the complexities of lived experience and familial history lingers long after viewing, encouraging one to ruminate on their own inherited legacies.

For Dan, 2020, 16mm with mono sound, Duration: 12 mins max, Installation view, Luke Fowler 'Index Cards and Letters', The Modern Institute, Osborne Street, 2021

Mum's Cards, 2018

16mm film with mono optical sound
Duration 9 minutes 3 seconds